Olivier Royis a professor at the L'Ecole de Haute ÃŒÃ¤tudes de Sciences Sociales in Paris (Ehess). he has written a number of books including The Failure of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Islam's encounter
with the west is as old as Islam itself. The first Muslim minorities living
under western Christian domination date back to the 11th century (in Sicily). Yet the second
half of the 20th century witnessed a distinctively new phenomenon: the massive,
voluntary settlement in western societies of millions of Muslims coming from Muslim
societies across the middle east, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Africa,
and southeast Asia. The west has also witnessed the development of an
indigenous trend of religious conversion (as in the case of the Nation of
Islam).

And yet, while a
Muslim population has definitively taken root in the west, the question of its
integration remains open, especially in western Europe, where there is an
overlap between Islam and work-driven immigration - an overlap that is not to
be found in the United
States. Socio-economic problems, cultural
issues, and political tensions related to terrorism or the conflicts in the
middle east converge around the question: is Islam compatible with the west?

Of course, this
question rests on an essentialist worldview, according to which there is one Islam, on the one
hand, and one western world, on the other hand. From that perspective, the west
is allegedly defined by a set of values (freedom of expression, democracy,
separation of church and state, human rights, and, especially, women's rights).
But a problem immediately arises: are these Christian values? Is the opposition
between Islam and the west derived from the fact that the west is Christian? Or
is it rather because the west is secularised and no longer locates religion at
the heart of its self-definition? Is it Christianity or secularism that makes
the west so distinct?

This article is extracted from the preface to Secularism Confronts Islam. openDemocracy is grateful to Columbia
University Press and Olivier Roy for permissionA family feud

The relation
between secularism and Christianity is complex. Either one defines the west in
Christian terms, or one defines it in reference to the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, human rights, and democracy that developed against the Catholic
church (through first the Protestant reformation, then the Enlightenment, and finally a
secular and democratic ideal). If the Catholic church has always fought
secularism and the separation of church and state (at least until the beginning
of the 20th century), Protestantism has played a more complex role by defending
a sort of religious civil society in which the separation of church and state
is seen as a necessary condition for a genuine religious revival.
Secularisation therefore proceeds differently in Catholic and Protestant societies
- against faith in the former, along with faith in the latter - to such an
extent that it is difficult to talk about the "west".

Contemporary
western societies, however, are, in fact, secularised, either because the
separation of church and state is a constitutional principle (the United
States); because civil society no longer defines itself through faith and
religious practice (the United Kingdom, Germany, the Scandinavian countries);
or because these two forms of secularism converge and reinforce each other,
thus giving birth to what the French call laïcité. And yet when
one opposes the west and Islam, it is by putting forward the Christian origins
of western culture or, on the contrary, by emphasising its secularism. In other
words, when we question Islam's capacity to become "westernised", we
are referring to two different forms of westernisation: Christianisation and
secularisation.

True, things are
more complex, and it would be easy to show that western secularism actually has
a Christian origin - as I do in my book, Secularism Confronts Islam. But it is
interesting to see that the critique of Islam is today a rallying-point for two
intellectual families that have been opposed to each other so far: those who
think that the west is first and foremost Christian (and who, not that long
ago, considered that the Jews could hardly be assimilated) and those who think
that the west is primarily secular and democratic. In other words, the
Christian right and the secular left are today united in their criticism of
Islam.

A debate of abstraction

But if
Christianity has been able to recast itself as one religion among others in a
secular space, why would this be impossible for Islam? Two arguments are
usually summoned to make this case: the first is theological and says that the
separation between religion and politics is foreign to Islam; the second is
cultural and posits that Islam is more than a religion: it is a culture. Both arguments
are addressed in Secularism Confronts
Islam.

But this
theoretical debate, which thrives on op-ed pieces and talk-shows, is
increasingly solved in the practice of Muslims themselves. The experience of
everyday life as a minority brings Muslims to develop practices, compromises,
and considerations meant to cope with a secularism that imposes itself
on them. This does not mean that Islam has never experienced secularism but
only that, with the exception of a few isolated thinkers, it never felt
the need to think about it. Today, both life-conditions in the west and the
domination of the western model through the process of globalisation compel
many Muslims to relate explicitly to this form of secularism, somewhat urgently
and under the pressure of political
events. This reflection spans a very wide intellectual spectrum that goes from
what I call neo-fundamentalism to liberal positions,
proceeding through all kinds of more or less enlightened conservatism.

Unfortunately,
the paradigms and models mobilised in the western debate over Islam hardly
reflect the real practices of Muslims. While the political debate over the
potential danger allegedly represented by Muslims is more or less inspired by
the intellectual debate about the "clash of civilisations", the help of
sociology (that is, the concrete analysis of Muslim practices) is hardly sought
even though sociology is at pains to grasp the concrete forms of religiosity
that characterise the practice of Islam within immigrant communities. One must
therefore abandon the current models in order to understand how it is possible
to practice one's faith as a Muslim in a secularised western context. And one
quickly realises then that Muslims tend to find
themselves in a position that is closer to that of the born-again
Christians or the Haredi Jews than to the position of a stranger.

A model conflict

So far, the west
has managed its Muslim population by mobilising two models: multiculturalism,
usually associated with English-speaking countries (the United Kingdom, the United
States, Canada) and northern
Europe, and the assimilationist model, specific to France.

Multiculturalism supposes that
Islam as a religion is embedded in a distinct culture that maintains itself
from one generation to the next. One can be a good citizen and at the same time
identify primarily with a culture that is not the dominant one. In other words,
the citizen's relation to the nation can be mediated by a
communitarian sense of belonging.

In the
assimilationist model (the official term is "integration"), access to
citizenship (which turns out to be relatively easy) means that individual
cultural backgrounds are erased and overridden by a political community, the
nation, that ignores all intermediary communitarian attachments (whether based
on race or on ethnic or religious identities), which are then removed to the private
sphere. As was declared in the French
national assembly during the vote that granted full citizenship to French Jews
in 1791: "They must be granted everything as individuals and nothing as a
nation" (in the sense of community).

Nothing could be
more opposed than the multicultural and assimilationist models: the French consider Anglo-Saxon
multiculturalism either as the destruction of national unity or as an instrument
of ghettoisation, while assimilationism is perceived abroad as the expression
of an authoritarian, centralised state that refuses to recognise minority
rights, when it does not infringe on human rights.

A recast relationship

Yet the tensions
that have troubled western societies since 11 September 2001 show that both
these models are in crisis. In France,
many young Muslims complain that theirs is a second-class citizenship and that they
are still the victims of racism, while they are integrated in terms of language
and education and accept laïcité.
Moreover, also in France,
young born-again Muslims demand to be recognised as believers in the public
space (by wearing a veil, if they are girls). At the same time, the increasing
radicalisation of a fraction of Muslim youth in the United
Kingdom and in the Netherlands has led to a shift in
public opinion in these countries, whereby the multicultural model is called
into question and accused of encouraging "separatism".

As a matter of
fact, both multiculturalism and assimilationism are in crisis for similar
reasons: both posit the existence of an intrinsic link between religion and
culture. Keeping one's religion also means keeping one's culture. Multiculturalism
therefore implies that religion remains embedded in a stable cultural
background, and assimiliationism implies that integration, by definition,
leads to the secularisation of beliefs and behaviours, since all cultural backgrounds
disappear.

But the problem
is that today's religious revival - whether under fundamentalist or
spiritualistic forms - develops by decoupling itself from any cultural reference.
It thrives on the loss of cultural identity: the young radicals are indeed perfectly
"westernised". Among the born-again and the converts (numerous young
women who want to wear the veil belong to these categories), Islam is seen not
as a cultural relic but as a religion that is universal and global and reaches
beyond specific cultures, just like evangelicalism or Pentecostalism. And this
loss of cultural identity is the condition both for integration and for new
forms of fundamentalism. Whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, religious
revivalism raises the question of the place of religion in the public sphere.
The debates about prayers in school, the display of the Ten Commandments in
courthouses, or the creation of an eruv following the request of Haredi
Jews to privatise public space on Shabbat
show that the recasting of the relation between the religious and the public
sphere is not specific to Islam.

A French exception

Why, then, pay so
much attention to French laicite, which until now seemed to be an
exception? There is today a convergence of the various debates taking place in
western countries: tellingly, they focus on the apparel worn by some Muslim
women (prohibition of the headscarf in French high schools, increasingly vocal
critique of the burqa in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands). The real issue
here is indeed the articulation of religious identity within the public sphere
and therefore the question of secularism. This debate started in France in 1989 and was continued in the United Kingdom
in 2006, following a newspaper article criticising a constituent's wearing of
the niqab (face-veil) by the then
leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw.

Is France an
exception, or does it represent a real alternative to multiculturalism? Here
lies the interest of studying the French model. From a
historical point of view, there is indeed a French exception: France may be
the only democracy that has fought religion in order to impose a state-enforced
secularism. In France,
laïcité is an exacerbated,
politicised, and ideological form of western secularism that has developed on two levels:

* A very strict
separation of church and state, against the backdrop of a political conflict
between the state and the Catholic church that resulted in a law regulating
very strictly the presence of religion in the public sphere (1905). This is
what I call legal laïcité

* An ideological
and philosophical interpretation of laïcité
that claims to provide a value system common to all citizens by expelling
religion into the private sphere. I call this ideological laicite: today, it leads the majority of the secular left to strike
an alliance with the Christian right against Islam.

Laïcité therefore defines national cohesion by
asserting a purely political identity that confines to the private sphere any
specific religious or cultural identities. Outside France, this very offensive and
militant laïcité is perceived as
excessive, and even undemocratic, since it violates individual freedom. It is
regularly denounced in the annual report of the United States state department
on religious freedom in the world (not only because of the prohibition of the
Muslim veil but also because of the restrictions placed on the activities of
sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists).

Yet, over a short
period of time, the initial hostility of European multiculturalist countries
toward the French model has turned into a renewed interest: what if the French were
right? A sizeable number of countries that have embraced multiculturalism so
far are about to restrict the wearing of the Islamic veil (the Netherlands, the United
Kingdom, Belgium,
Germany).
This interest in laicite is primarily
negative: it stems from the crisis (from the death, I would even argue) of
multiculturalism.

If the
multicultural model has failed, then one should look at the alternative
represented by the French model. But is French laïcité a solution? How does it work? Isn't it too specific to the
French context? How can one imagine both the national cohesion of western
societies and the development, beyond specific cultures, of "faith
communities" based on individual and voluntary choices, which, however, put
forward their specific agendas? Communitarianism and individualism go hand in
hand in these faith communities.

The redefinition
of the relations between religion and politics is a new challenge for the west,
and not only because of Islam. Islam is a mirror in which the west projects its
own identity crisis. We live in a post-culturalist society, and this
post-culturalism is the very foundation of the contemporary religious revival.

Managing these
new forms of religiosity is a challenge for the west as a whole. It is also a
task to which Secularism Confronts Islam
intends to contribute - by drawing the lessons from the French debate, but only
to resituate it in the general context of the relations between Islam and the
west.

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